If you're planning your next trip to photograph your award-winning star trails image, be sure you know the levels of light pollution in the surrounding areas first.
Visit The night sky in the World for this data – see two examples of their maps – The World Atlas of the Artificial Night Sky Brightness and North America (notice how polluted the night sky on the eastern side of the US is).
Armed with this knowledge, you can then decide on your exposure (how long to keep the shutter open, what ISO) and stacking / blending (normally done with Photoshop) strategy.
Several good tips and techniques were offered in reply to twentysixtynine's question on getting better skin tones in portraits.
SLOtographer:
I normally use the "smooth" film setting with noise reduction and sharpness at -2. I can tweak the saturation to taste in cam or post. For B&W I normally use standard (for kids), sometimes dynamic (grizzly looking friends).
David Carr:
1) Shoot RAW.
2) Buy an 18% grey card (although you may be able to do this with just a sheet of white paper). Photograph this (as a JPEG) in good, evenly lit daylight with your camera set to AWB. Open the JPEG in Photoshop. Use the eye dropper to measure the colour of the grey card. If your AWB is correct, you will see equal levels of red, green and blue. You probably won't but you will be able to get an idea of how off the balance is. Now go into the camera's menu > white balance > auto white balance and use the right-hand arrow to open up the tool for fine-tuning the white balance. Here you can correct any imbalance betweeen red, green and blue that you measured in Photoshop. Take another picture as before with your corrected auto white balance, open in Photoshop, measure as before and continue the process until you have even levels of red, green and blue. You will now have adjusted your camera's white balance setting.
3) Shoot raw and then convert to Adobe DNG with the free Adobe DNG converter. Use a Macbeth Colour Checker chart to create a custom profile for your raw converter.
4) Give up using auto white balance. Always do a custom white balance or, failing that, at least set your camera to a white balance setting appropriate for your light. This will make colour-correcting easier in post-production.
5) There are no easy solutions. It's a question of effort.
Brad Morris:
Make sure that you update to the latest firmware.
Shooting RAW does give good skin tones, the magenta cast only seems to be with AWB (automatic white balance) in daylight using the JPEG engine as far as I can tell. I generally shoot RAW and JPG.
You can make adjustment to fine tune AWB in the menus.
Experiment, you can add more green and yellow.
Flash WB gives reasonable daylight skin tones too for jpeg also.
Nikon P90 Image Quality? – 44Magpie:
I've had my P90 for a while now and couldn't be happier with it. As long as you realize it's not a DSLR it will serve your purpose. I bought this for the huge zoom factor and it is wonderful. ALL point&shoot photos need a little tweaking in Photoshop or whatever and this camera is no different. I get great results with the camera set to standard settings and run my preset macro in Photoshop and I am done. Photos are beautiful.
K-7 user opinion and photos by Dale108 – Highlights:
- The Pentax K-7 feels solid.
- Fast start-up times and responsive.
- AF is much faster than on the K20D. Focusing with the DA* 50-135mm lens was possible even in an almost dark room.
- Focus was fast and sure for wildlife photography using the Tamron 70-200mm f/2.8 and a Tamron 1.4x TC (teleconverter). See the woodpecker photo at full size.
- Illumination for the the two butterfly photos, at ISO 1600 (see full size) and ISO 3200 (see full size, or a 100% crop), was provided by a Sigma Flash Macro Ring EM-140 DG.
- RAW conversion was done in ACR (Adobe Camera RAW – the EXIF shows that Adobe Photoshop CS3 was used).
